A Touch of the Unknown (Short Stories)

Only in Memory

"That's bullshit, man. He's basically immortal then!"

The fate of the action figure, having just taken a missile blast straight to the face, now rested entirely on Joseph's ability to convince the others how he could have survived the attack.

"It didn't really even hit him... it hit my finger," Joseph said. The throbbing in his fingernail bore witness to this fact. The 'missile' was actually a steel ball bearing tossed, with assistance, from the hand of one of the other action figures. It was a one in a million shot, hitting its target from no less than five feet away.

Alex, the elder of the three, finally chimed in with the tie-breaking vote. "Yeah, but only because you were holding him by the head. It hit him, man. He's dead."

In the years before, this conversation never would have happened.

In their younger days, Joseph, Eddie and Alex had orchestrated endless waves of world-scale dramas on the floor of Alex's bedroom. Every story was laced with drama of the highest order. There was political intrigue. Weapons smuggling and assassinations. Nuclear catastrophes. Betrayal. Alien invasions. But in those earlier times it was never put to question how any of their characters were able to survive such devastation.

The plastic that the toys were made of may as well have been immortal, but the decision to introduce death and finality to their little plays had made sense to all three when they decided on it the week before. If a character suffered some grave injury, he was done. End of story. The new rule had to be honored.

"I guess he's dead then," Joseph finally said.

After having spent a good fifteen minutes coming up with his backstory and giving him some emotional reason to fight, Joseph hesitated to throw him back into the pile. Finally, it hit with a plastic thud and he picked up another.

The three played for a while longer with Joseph having created a new character to move into the old one's stronghold, though the new one wasn't quite as interesting and he didn't have quite as much reason to fight. And perhaps as a result of the rule change the three began to lose interest almost as quickly as the story had started.

"Are you guys getting bored, too?" Joseph asked.

"Yeah..." Alex said. "You guys want to go to the creek?"

Alex, the tall one, always led the way. Eddie and Joseph trailed behind, carrying makeshift hiking sticks though the field saw no rise or dip at any point but the creek.

Sometimes they sat out there together just to get away from the things going on at home. It was strange how that seemed to work out, though, as they often stayed over at each other's houses. Whoever's house they slept at seemed to transform from some bitter, hopeless cage to the place to be just by virtue of the company they shared.

In the dirt outside of the creek, Eddie spotted a lizard and threw a rock.

"Nailed him!" he said.

After a moment the dust cleared to reveal the lizard still sitting there unaffected, shortly scurrying away before Eddie could find another rock.

"I fucking hit him. You saw that, right?"

"Yeah, it looked like you got him," Joseph agreed.

"Maybe he's immortal, too!" Alex joked.

The three burst into laughter.

That was all it took. From then on they began referring to anything with even the slightest bit of fortitude as 'immortal'. The three fixated on the word to the point that it almost lost meaning. But no matter how far they stretched it, together they understood. It was synonymous with strength. Coolness in the face of fire. Badassery.